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Gamzee Makara-2
Personality Gamzee has two distinct sides to his personality. On the one hand (and how he presents most of the time), he’s a very laid back, sweet, whimsical kind of guy. He loves his friends, he likes nothing more than kicking back and relaxing or listening to music and making up his own raps. He’s weird, sure, and he tends to say some funky stuff, but he’s essentially a harmless guy who’s pretty easy to get along with, and who never seems to get mad, even when people are insulting him to his face. He gets excited about even little things and bits of magic, and has a tendency to call anything he doesn’t understand immediately a “miracle”. He also tries to see the bright side, or silver lining to everything around him. He’s enthusiastic, and can talk for hours about the things like interest him. But because of his childhood (and possibly some inherent instability/mental illness in his family), Gamzee also has a terrible temper. It arises unpredictably, but there comes a point in his mind, for whatever reason, where he decides he’s had enough. And then he can get really, really nasty. When he was younger, this took the form of furious, violent attacks on whoever his target was for the time being – he was a biter early on, and has always been willing to use whatever weapon came to hand. Now that he’s a bit older, he’s learned to control his temper to some extent, but there are still times when he decides someone’s going to get it, and he strikes out. He just bides his time about it now, and is sneakier in how he attacks. At times he can even be sadistic about it, taunting or mocking the other person in subtle ways. His reasons for disliking people or deciding they need to be punished seem pretty random at times, but in Gamzee’s mind, they make perfect sense. Both of these extremes hide certain insecurities and assumptions that make up who Gamzee really is. When he was very little, his mother didn’t impose much in the way of rules on him, and would frequently leave him alone for far longer than a small child should be. He had no boundaries or sense of order. Later, with his father, there were a lot more rules, but the man was also gone a lot, and therefore couldn’t enforce him. Due to his halfblood status, Gamzee never really fit in with other Muggle children, and therefore was a bit of a loner. All of which added up to him being very poorly socialized. He simply doesn’t pick up on a lot of social cues, and worse, he’s very bad at reading his own emotions and knowing how to handle them. He started using drugs very early on, and this took away any chance for him to learn coping skills. It can make him very childish at times, and poor at controlling his impulses. He’s getting better, but it’s hard. The lack of social contact has also instilled in him a deep seated fear of abandonment. It makes him unswervingly loyal to his friends, and also willing to take a whole lot of shit from them. He’ll laugh off or ignore any number of insults, just so long as someone will stay with him, and he’d do just about anything for the people he cares about. More often than not, it’s a perceived slight on one of his friends that sets Gamzee off, but what he’ll interpret as an insult to them varies wildly with his mood and how much attention he’s paying. Gamzee can be remarkably sharp about some things, but he’s easily distractible. Background Gamzee Makara was born to a witch mother and a Muggle father. He was an accident, as his mother was a free spirit and not always careful about protection when she slept around. As such, his father didn’t even know he existed at first. His mother raised the son she’d had in the wizarding world. From a young age he was exposed to magic and quite a lot of it, as his mother was perfectly content to bring her infant and later toddler along on her ‘adventures’ (which involved some illicit potions use and a great deal of danger). He was with her until the age of 5, at which point she got tired of him, possibly because at that point she’d become involved with a wizard who didn’t care much for children. Using a spell, she located his Muggle father, a fisherman, and essentially dropped the boy off on the man’s doorstep, in a small village in Wales called Penclawdd. The man accepted the boy, feeling responsible for him, though he lived alone and had never intended to have children. He was a gruff and quiet fellow, and was never quite sure what to do with his odd son, who kept talking about magic. The man wasn’t even aware that the woman he’d impregnated was a witch, and so he assumed his son was just strange and possibly mentally defective. That view was only reinforced when Gamzee was enrolled in school, and continued to talk about what he’d seen as a child, insisting magic was real. While Gamzee wasn’t actually stupid, he tended to be stubborn about what he believed was right and true, and he was bullied quite a lot, though as the years went by, his memories grew fainter and fainter. He started to refer to the magic he’d seen as ‘miracles’, and became steadily more withdrawn and depressed. His father was gone much of the time with work, and with Gamzee isolated from most of his peers, he was quite lonely. It didn’t help that he was prone to fits of temper, at times lashing out at other children when he became frustrated at their treatment of him. It was at a fairly young age, around eight, that he first turned to mind-altering substances. He was trying to paint a model that his father had gotten him for Christmas, though he wasn’t particularly good at it, and he found that the fumes from the glue made him feel a little lightheaded. It was a nice feeling, he decided, and it made him forget about being angry or sad, at least for a little while. Over the next few years, he discovered quite a few more things that could induce the same feelings – paint thinner, propane, kerosene, hair spray, cooking spray, even petrol would work. The euphoria from them was nice, though sometimes the hallucinations could be frightening. But because he’d always been odd, no one suspected that he was doing inhalants – he’d been written off as mentally ill by his teachers some time ago. As long as he wasn’t hurting anyone else or himself, they were content to leave him be. The Hogwarts letter when he was 11 came as a huge shock to his father. All of a sudden he had to contend with the fact that his strange son had actually been telling the truth all these years, and that some of the weird things that had been happening in his home for the last year or so were the results of Gamzee’s magic starting to manifest. But in some ways it was a relief, too, since he could count on some new people to take care of the boy that he’d never been very good with. Gamzee himself was excited to once again become a part of the world he’d remembered as a child. But once he got to Hogwarts, he found he didn’t fit in there all that well either. He thought he might have some things in common with the Muggleborns, but the kinds of things Gamzee was into were considered weird even by their standards, since he was a fan of music that others considered ridiculous, and was obsessed with carnival imagery. The halfbloods tended to view him in a similar light, and even the purebloods who weren’t particularly prejudiced didn’t know what to do with him – he was too steeped in his own odd Muggle culture. His enjoyment of illicit substances didn’t help, either. While drug use might have been considered cool in some older kids, it was just gross and kind of creepy in an 11 year old, and he was soon reported to the professors. He was quickly stopped from any further huffing. But because of the substance abuse, and rather neglectful childhood, Gamzee had never learned any good coping skills for stress. He became known for picking fights, and being extraordinarily vicious in his attacks, biting and scratching and using weapons. The only thing that saved him from being kicked out of Hogwarts entirely was the fact that he didn’t pick on younger or more defenseless students. He usually went after older ones, and his inexperience and lack of ability with magic meant he usually lost. Finally, near the end of the year, the headmaster had a meeting with Gamzee and his father, and it was made clear that this behavior not only could not continue, but that Gamzee was failing all his classes. He might have been expelled entirely, but for the fact that it was probably dangerous to have a halfblood like him running around, completely untrained. It was decided that Gamzee would be allowed to repeat his first year, under the provision that he clean up his act. Terrified of losing the magic world he remembered from his early years, Gamzee agreed, and he came back the next year. He still had a problem with inhalants, but he didn’t do it at the school, and he did his best to focus on his schoolwork and control his temper. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but he did a little better, and the fact that he actually made a few friends that year helped more. Gamzee managed to scrape past his first year. The next year was a little easier, as the boy finally started to get into the rhythm of things. He was still getting into trouble a lot, but it tended to be for minor infractions. He still got into fights, but he was more careful about it, too. And he still had a pretty significant problem with substance abuse, but he was starting to discover whole new highs in the magical world – potions. It turned out that Gamzee actually had a knack for the discipline, though he had an unfortunate tendency to get creative, and he did well in the class. In fact, now that he was paying more attention and getting a bit smarter about where and when to let loose, he was finding that there were several classes he enjoyed – Herbology, especially. Once he hit his third year, he picked up home economics, as well, and things were starting to look up for him. Gamzee will probably never be considered anything like normal. But his friends, his growing self-control, and the sheer allowance for weird in the wizarding world means he had a chance where he might not have, stuck in a small village in Wales.